


Fenario

by ftmsteverogers



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Hunter Retirement (Supernatural), Jewish Castiel (Supernatural), Jewish Dean Winchester, Jewish Winchesters (Supernatural), M/M, Post-Canon, Post-Canon Fix-It, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-23
Updated: 2021-02-23
Packaged: 2021-03-17 17:27:06
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,958
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29104029
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ftmsteverogers/pseuds/ftmsteverogers
Summary: “We did good, Dean,” Sam says. “We got him back.”Dean huffs a hollow laugh, because yeah, that’s always what it’s about, isn’t it? Cas or Sam or Dean getting themselves lost or dead, and then taking turns dragging each other back from the brink. He shrugs, shoving his hands into his pockets.“We got him back, yeah,” he says. Sam nods, watching him. “So now what?”
Relationships: Castiel/Dean Winchester
Comments: 89
Kudos: 184





	1. darkness, darkness

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from Fenario by Richard Shindell. 
> 
> This is the [lake house fic](https://castieljew.tumblr.com/tagged/lake%20house%20fic%22) I've been discussing on my blog for months :)

**prologue**

Cas claws out of the Empty covered in black oil. He’s drenched in it, head to toe, gasping mouth showing brilliantly white teeth in contrast. His eyes are wild and unfocused, lashes sticky, and his hand clutches Dean’s forearm in a bruising grip. Dean’s hollering to Sam, he doesn’t know what he’s saying, but Sam is at his side in a second, grabbing Dean around the waist to dig his heels in and help pull him backward. Together, they drag Cas the rest of the way through the bubbling pothole of tar on the forest floor.

The force of how hard they have to yank topples them backward, Cas landing awkwardly half on Dean’s shins and half sprawled out on the leafy ground. He’s gasping, over and over, and Dean wrenches himself up to sitting so he can drag Cas kneeling upright, hands alighting on his shoulders, his collarbone, the vulnerable underside of his jaw. Everywhere he touches is sticky-black, hot and slick like drying blood.

“Dean,” Cas rasps. His voice breaks, Dean’s name a hoarse whisper.

“Hey, hey,” Dean says. He crushes Cas close, smearing black on his shirt, on his jacket. He puts his hand to the nape of Cas’s neck, where the Empty’s muck is greasy in his hair. “You’re okay. It’s okay, I’ve got you, alright? Sam, the blankets —”

Sam scrambles up to get the bundle Dean shoved into the backseat before they left, and all Dean can do is clutch at Cas, wiping slime off his face with his sleeve cuff. Cas is crying, he realizes, tears making streaks down his filthy face — Dean has never seen him cry like this, maybe never seen anyone, dead silent and grasping with hands that dig half-moon fingernail imprints into Dean’s forearms.

Sam is back with the blankets. He wraps one around Cas’s shoulders and lets Dean swipe the other out of his hands so he can bundle Cas up into it, tight as he can, as if that can possibly contain the anguish bleeding out of him. 

“Get the car running,” Dean says, eyes snapping up to Sam. 

“We need to finish the ritual,” Sam says. Behind him, the hole leading down into the Empty bubbles and boils.

He’s right, but Dean hates it. “Finish it, then,” he growls. 

Sam nods, tight-lipped, and opens the spellbook to begin the incantation. Cas’s legs give out and he pitches forward, falling the rest of the way into Dean’s lap in a mockery of a pieta — Dean catches him up into his arms and rocks a little, back and forth. The dazed panic of the past few weeks is beginning to melt into familiar  _ we just cheated death  _ disbelief, his whole chest aching like a numb limb roused to pins and needles. Cas is alive. Cas is alive and breathing and trembling beneath the blankets, and Dean squeezes his eyes closed as he presses his face into Cas’s muddy hair.

Sam finishes the incantation. The hole in the forest floor snaps closed with an uneasy rumble, spitting up black bile before it folds down on itself into nothing. Sam prods the spot with the toe of his boot until he’s satisfied, then gives Dean a sharp nod.

Dean rubs Cas’s back, up and down over the blanket. “Let’s go home,” he says.

Cas says nothing in reply, but his fistful of Dean’s shirt tightens minutely.

* * *

Back at the bunker, Dean runs Cas a bath. He half expects to be shoved out of the bathroom so Cas can handle it himself, but he isn’t, so he doesn’t leave. Cas stands in the middle of the room staring vacantly in front of himself while Dean turns on the tap, drizzles a little soap into the water to make suds while the tub fills, shooting little cautious glances toward Cas out of the corners of his eyes.

“Okay,” Dean announces with false brightness, standing up again. “Let’s get this shit off you, yeah?”

Cas’s trench coat is probably ruined. Dean’s throat feels tight as he goes to push it off Cas’s shoulders, easing it down — Cas woodenly removes his arms from the sleeves and unknots his tie, fingers clumsy as they start on the buttons of his shirt.

“I gotcha, lemme help,” Dean says, and steps in to finish the task. Cas’s tie hangs limply down from a lax hand, dragging against the tile floor. 

It isn’t Cas’s silence that freaks Dean out. On the whole, Dean would say he and Cas have spent the majority of their time together in silence, soaking in the uneasy camaraderie they were never meant to share. It’s that blank look on his face that scares him, his slack jaw, the way he lets Dean maneuver him around to undress him the rest of the way with no protest.

“In the tub, buddy,” Dean murmurs, taking Cas’s elbow to help him step into the bath.

He pointedly does not look at anything but the parts of Cas he’s touching, his hand, his bent elbow, the broad wing of his shoulder blade. Cas slides into the water and sighs, blue eyes slipping shut as his head bows forward. Dean’s tongue is thick in his mouth.

He’s struck by a memory of a program he’d caught a couple minutes of one time while channel flipping in a motel, a nature special about wildlife caught in an oil spill. Dean pours shampoo into his hand and thinks about those small sad pelicans covered in black gunk, and the care with which their rescuers cleaned them.

“Gonna do your hair first, alright?” he says, keeping his voice soft as he starts to massage it into Cas’s scalp. The Empty’s residue looks thick as molasses, but it melts away pretty easy, sloughing off Cas’s head in filthy rivulets. Dean cups his hands under the running faucet and pours clean water over Cas’s head by the handful, repeating the process as many times as it takes to make his hair run clear. Then he grabs a washcloth and squirts soap into it, rubbing his hand against the cloth to make it foam before he begins applying it to Cas’s face.

It isn’t until he’s rinsed Cas’s face that he realizes just how haggard the guy looks, dark circles under his eyes and cracked, chapped lips. Dean wrings out the washcloth over the tub and gets more soap. 

“Thank you,” Cas whispers. 

Dean stills with his hand mid-scrub across Cas’s bicep and swallows hard. “Don’t mention it.”

He’s washing Cas’s hand, cleaning the webbing between his fingers, when he notices the mark on his elbow. “What the hell?” he mutters, pulling Cas’s arm out of the murky water so he can see the puffy red scar better — it blisters around the jut of his elbow in the shape of a hand print, and Dean’s stomach swoops when he realizes.

That’s from his hand. Seared into Cas’s body to show where Dean had grasped him as he pulled him out of the Empty.

“There’s another here,” Cas says, twisting his torso around to face Dean with a quiet splash and a ripple, and tips his head to the side. There’s another hand print right where his neck meets his shoulder, the shape of the fingers splayed wide. It shines wetly under the bathroom fluorescents, and Dean  _ knows  _ it’s his hand, but the point is brought effectively home when he sees the shape of his ring add an extra notch to his finger’s imprint. Dean reaches out, hesitant, and fits his hand to the shape that’s been burned into Cas’s skin.

“Sorry,” Dean says, rough. “Looks like I got you pretty good.” 

Cas’s eyes are bloodshot and complicated. “Thank you for using both hands,” he says. He puts his own on top of Dean’s, pressing it firmer into his neck.

Dean strokes over the raised burn where the pad of his thumb has branded Cas, struck dumb by the sight.

* * *

“Cas down for the count?” Sam asks.

Dean is sitting on the floor with his back to the hallway wall, arms on his bent knees, and glances up at Sam. He nods. 

Sam looks at the closed door behind which Dean hopes Cas is actually resting. He sighs, crossing his arms over his chest, and Dean is suddenly more claustrophobic than he knows how to handle. 

“Keep watch for a bit,” Dean mutters, shoving himself up to standing again.

Sam frowns at him, opening his mouth, but Dean is already staggering toward the door, and has stopped listening. He makes it outside before nausea overtakes him, but only just — he throws up in the bushes by the front door, bent over double, hands braced on his knees. He retches, coughing up bile.

Sam is there a second later, front door slamming closed behind him, and Dean can’t muster up the energy to do much more than wave him off when Sam tries to ask if he’s okay. He spits one last time into the dirt, wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, and makes himself stand upright. He’s going to last maybe two minutes before he has to go inside and brush his teeth, but the cool air outside feels good while he can stand the bad taste in his mouth, even with Sam’s eyes boring holes into the back of his head.

“We did good, Dean,” Sam says. “We got him back.”

Dean huffs a hollow laugh, because yeah, that’s always what it’s about, isn’t it? Cas or Sam or Dean getting themselves lost or dead, and then taking turns dragging each other back from the brink. He shrugs, shoving his hands into his pockets.

In the distance, a bird is singing, one of those mournful little warbles that puts Dean’s teeth on edge. It’s only barely the afternoon, the sun is warm where it lands on him, but his arms have both broken out in gooseflesh and he doesn’t think he can completely blame it on the residual smears of the Empty that lick up his forearms.

“You gonna talk to me?” Sam asks eventually. 

“I’m tired of this, man,” Dean says. He scuffs his foot on the ground, kicking a pebble. “I’m just fucking tired of it.”

The sympathetic face Sam is making when Dean turns to look at him has Dean’s hackles threatening to rise again. He shakes off the urge to snap and glances away, toward the bunker where Cas is inside. He feels insane — he wants to dash indoors again and check, wants to make sure it wasn’t just a trick of the light, that the bed he’d tucked Cas away into after his bath is still full of angel like he left it. It’s the same feeling that has made Dean check on Sam in the middle of the night at least once a week since they were children.

“We got him back, yeah,” Dean says. Sam nods, watching him. “So now what?”


	2. come the dawn he'll rise and go

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Explain to Cas why the house is a good plan,” Dean tells Sam, gesturing a little helplessly. 
> 
> Sam blinks. “Uh. You know that thing where Victorian women got sent to the seaside to feel less crazy?”
> 
> “Dude!” Dean exclaims, smacking Sam’s arm.

**chapter one**

The lake house is in Fort Collins Colorado and it is in a complete state of disrepair. The front deck has rotted away into almost nothing, just a rickety set of steps up to a yellow door with peeling paint. Dean puts his hand on the decaying banister and feels the way the late afternoon sun has soaked inside and warmed it to the touch, rubbing his thumb against a knot in the wood.

“Wow, this is a _lot_ worse than they told us over the phone,” Sam marvels under his breath, shielding his eyes from the sun with a hand. “Is it even up to fire code?”

Dean snorts quietly and thumbs over that knot of wood again, wondering how long the house has been sitting here decomposing.

The real estate agent is talking to Cas, and she explains the history of the house to him in detail. He’s listening intently, Dean knows that look, all grave interest and zeroed-in focus — that’s the look that did him in, way back when. Cas likes to talk like it’s always been him following Dean around, but Dean’s known in the back of his head for longer than he’d care to admit that he’d go wherever those somber blue eyes led him.

“It’s a little bit of a fixer-upper,” the real estate lady admits, bangles clinking on her wrist as she gestures. “But the bones are good. She’s a sturdy little house.”

Dean lies his palm flat against the door, and thinks about etching wards into the foundation, into the walls. They can rip up the rotting floorboards and dust the ground with salt before they install new ones, they can bury lead stakes with hex bags at the corners of their property, they can build a house made for keeping people like them safe. Not that there’s a whole lot to keep safe from, there hasn’t been since Jack took over, but if Dean starts thinking about Jack right now, he'll lose his breath before he even crosses the threshold.

 _The bones are good,_ Dean thinks. A piece of yellow paint chips off the door, lands on the toe of his boot, and Dean falls in love.

“Let’s see the inside,” he says.

Cas is looking at him when Dean opens the door, eyes dark and curious.

Real estate lady — Janet, Dean remembers — begins her spiel about the front room, and Dean crosses to the window to check out the sight lines while the others listen. Not too shabby, honestly, and he spots the lake glittering a blue-green promise in the distance. 

He sees Cas’s reflection in the glass, too, the way he tilts his head to the side the same way he’s always done when he looks right back, unreadable and still familiar all the same. Dean smiles at the glass. Cas glances away, the corner of his mouth tipped up in response. 

The rental furniture is kind of tacky, but Dean turns to glance around the room and sees in his mind’s eye how he would change it. Add a sofa, some chairs. Maybe a recliner. Coffee mugs half-consumed and abandoned around the room, on the windowsill, on the little table, and it’s too easy by far to add all the people he loves to the image as well, Eileen and Claire and _Jack_ — and Bobby, too, Jo and Ellen and Dean’s own mom, maybe —

“Dean,” Cas is saying, his hand suddenly on Dean’s elbow. 

Dean’s eyes are clouded. He blinks to clear them and Cas is just right there, looking concerned, and also way more present in the moment than he has in a while. Dean doesn’t want to think about why he’s only managing that when Dean’s visibly fucked up and needing something.

Not that he really has any idea what he needs, right now. Or what the hell his face is doing, for that matter.

“Come look at the bedrooms,” Cas says, grabbing Dean’s sleeve and tugging him up the stairs. That leaves Sam with Janet, but Dean figures they can catch up with them after the wave of dizziness has passed and he can check out the rooms Cas wants to show him.

The upstairs is in a lot better shape than downstairs. That’s kind of promising, actually, although the stair banister could use some serious work, listing a little to the side. Definitely sanding and refinishing, he decides, patting the wood with an absent hand as he lets Cas lead him to the end of the hall.

He knows immediately which room would be for Cas. Two windows at the intersection of a corner sketch out the perfect place for a reading nook, and Dean is halfway through assembling a bookcase for him in his mind before Cas gets his attention again, nodding his head toward the other room. Dean can see the very tip of his thumb print scar peeking up above the collar of Cas’s shirt when Cas turns his head.

This next bedroom is slightly bigger than the first, with a huge closet that might actually fit most of Dean’s hunting gear if he’s a little clever about it and organizes everything by what he actually needs on-hand. He idly considers what it’d be like to rent a storage unit between the lake house and the bunker for the rest of his stuff before he’s viscerally reminded of his dad and has to count backward from ten in his mind.

“What are you thinking?” Cas asks.

Dean looks at him. Cas’s head is tilted again, openly trying to read him. Not that he’s ever particularly tried to hide it — as long as Dean’s known him, Cas has been working him like a safe to crack. Somebody really should have warned the guy Dean’s a lot of locks around a whole lot of nothing a long time ago. 

“I’m thinking it’d be a lot of work,” Dean tells him. “Lotta work I’d have to learn as we go.”

“You made your decision the moment we pulled up,” Cas says. “Didn’t you.”

Dean looks away. He’d held out until he put his hand on the door, technically, but that isn’t the point. “It’s not just my choice,” he points out. “You gotta like the place too.”

 _We’re getting it for you, after all,_ Dean doesn’t say, because he doesn’t want to make Cas’s face shutter, not now that he’s actually looking alive and holding a conversation. 

“I admit I don’t completely understand what this house will give us that the bunker does not,” Cas replies, running his fingertips along the windowsill idly. He rubs them together afterward, eyeing the dust he’d collected, and glances up at Dean again with a small smile. “But I trust your judgement.”

Why Cas would do a boneheaded thing like that is beyond Dean. He snorts, rolling his eyes as he walks over to him. “The bunker’s fine, but it’s not, y’know. Built for relaxing,” he tries to explain. “Sam’s right, we need some R&R. Gonna be useless otherwise.”

“I didn’t realize we still need to be useful,” Cas says. His lip curls on the last word. 

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Dean asks, taken aback.

Cas sighs. “Never mind. You intend to keep hunting, then?”

“Well, yeah,” Dean says. “That’s what I do.” 

Cas’s expression is pure resignation, and Dean instantly feels like a tool, although he has no idea why. It’s not like he’s ever _not_ hunted, and he finds himself bewildered and speechless as he tries to figure out what angle to approach Cas at. He’s looking away, jaw tense, and won’t meet Dean’s eye.

“Hey,” Dean says. He knows what he would be sore about, if it was him. “Sam and I were already thinking about getting a safe house set up separate from the bunker, anyway. This isn’t about you being an invalid.”

Cas huffs an exasperated breath and crosses his arms over his chest. “I thought you liked the bunker.”

“I do,” Dean admits, an acid taste on the back of his tongue. If Cas hates this — if he doesn’t want it — 

“Makes it pretty hard to keep work at work, though,” Sam points out from the doorway. “What with the whole sleeping underground next to a war room thing. How d’you like the bedrooms?”

Cas stares at Sam. “They’re fine.”

“Explain to Cas why the house is a good plan,” Dean tells Sam, gesturing a little helplessly. 

Sam blinks. “Uh. You know that thing where Victorian women got sent to the seaside to feel less crazy?”

“Dude!” Dean exclaims, smacking Sam’s arm.

Cas considers this. “I was a Victorian woman once,” he says thoughtfully. “That seems thematically appropriate.”

Dean’s mouth hangs open, gaping.

“Well, boys?” Janet asks from the doorway. She grins, hands on her hips. “What are you thinking?”

Dean looks at Sam, then at Cas, and consciously shoves everything he’s thinking aside. “You willing to take cash?” he asks, flashing Janet his most winning smile.

* * *

It's a six and a half hour drive from Fort Collins back to Lebanon, the kind of drive Dean's used to, but it's different with Cas in the car. The afternoon melts into evening, slides into night, and Dean's always been a sucker for driving late in the day, the radio soft in the background.

“You didn’t have to say yes to the first place we checked out,” Sam says after a while, quietly enough that he and Dean can pretend Cas can’t hear them from the backseat. Cas is pretty occupied with looking out the window anyway, grave as the dead again, and Dean is trying not to stare at him in the rearview mirror as the road lights gild him orange in brief flashes.

“I know,” Dean says. He consciously unclenches his hands from around the steering wheel before they go white-knuckled. “I just got a feeling about this one.”

“A feeling,” Sam repeats, unimpressed. “What kind of feeling?”

“Just — y’know, a feeling!” Dean jabs at him with his elbow, but doesn’t fight back too hard when Sam dodges it by sliding all the way to the other end of the bench seat. “Gut instinct, Sammy.”

“Perhaps it’s indigestion,” Cas suggests.

Dean rolls his eyes when Sam shoots Cas an approving nod. “Just trust me,” he insists. “This is the one.”

Cas is looking at him. Dean can feel it prickle across the back of his neck, the same as he can feel Sam’s dubious gaze without glancing to the side to see it. 

“I do,” Cas says. 

“Huh?”

“I do trust you.”

He’s looking out the window again. Dean swallows thickly. “Good,” he says, rough. There was a time not even all that long ago when that sentence wouldn’t have surprised him.

* * *

Dean sleeps like shit, their last night at the bunker, but what else is new. He’s pretty much packed up, none of them really have all that much shit, aside from clothes and assorted weapons and magical paraphernalia, but he’s also pretty attached to his memory foam mattress and Cas has accumulated at least a small bag’s worth of knickknacks over the years.

Dean can’t find a comfortable position in bed. It isn’t just the fact that the weather’s getting warmer and the bunker has terrible ventilation, but that really doesn’t help, leaving him sweaty and tangled in a top sheet with a frustrated arm slung across his eyes. What’s Cas up to? He’s an angel, he doesn’t sleep, although Dean took long enough puttering around the kitchen aimlessly after dinner for Cas to decide it was time to take himself to bed.

Hell, maybe he’s tossing and turning as well. Dean wouldn’t blame him. It’s a tossing and turning kind of night, his box fan humming, reminding him of every shitty motel room he and Sam have ever slept in, and it puts him in that familiar restless state of mind.

He’d meant what he’d said to Cas earlier. This isn’t the first time he and Sam have toyed with the idea of getting a safe house somewhere. However, it’s the first time they’ve actually taken steps toward making it happen, and Dean’s not sure they ever would have gotten there without the excuse of giving Cas a nice spot to recuperate. 

He hopes it works. The haunted look in Cas’s eyes makes him feel funny on the inside, like a charley horse in his goddamn chest, and there isn’t much in the world he wouldn’t do if he knew it’d make Cas stop looking like that. So he’ll put hunting on the back burner for a month or two, regroup from defeating God — they’ve earned that, he thinks. He’ll fix up the lake house and keep an eye on Cas and maybe by the end of it he’ll even be able to string more than three hours of sleep together at a time.

The soft rap of knuckles against his door is the only warning he gets before the hall light is spilling into his room, Cas’s body a shadow haloed by it. Dean’s tongue sticks to the roof of his mouth. Many dreams he’s had have started this very way, although usually preceded by the ruffling sound of feathers, ozone tang on the back of his tongue from the effect of Cas materializing near him. 

“I heard you rolling around,” Cas murmurs, shutting the door behind himself. “I can’t rest either.”

Dean is sitting up in bed by now, clutching fistfuls of the blankets around his waist. “Uh,” he says. “Cas —”

“Hush,” Cas says. He slides into the bed and pushes Dean until he gives up and lies back down. Cas spoons up behind him immediately, snaking an arm around his waist, and Dean has just enough time to think _what the fuck!_ before he feels the tell-tale cool burn of grace where they’re touching and his eyelids immediately droop. The contrast in temperature with the muggy room makes Dean shiver.

They’d cat-napped like this plenty in Purgatory, Dean guesses, with Benny on the other side. It doesn’t have to be weird unless he makes it weird. 

“Cheater,” he mutters. “You’re cheating.”

“Go to sleep,” Cas replies. His cheek presses against the space between Dean’s shoulder blades. “I have this watch.”

That sounds pretty sensible to Dean’s grace-addled brain. He passes right the hell out.

* * *

In his dreams, Dean lies on a bed of sweet cool grass beneath a sky resplendent with stars. One by one the stars dot out into nothing, leaving inky blackness in their wake, and Dean feels fear touch him with an icy hand before his eyes trace the shape of the wings blotting out the moon.

How the wings all connect, he has no idea. There’s a whole mess of them at odd angles, huge and imposing, but Dean is no longer afraid. His gaze has locked on the figure at the center of the mass, writhing blue fire blooming around three animal heads — a lion, a falcon, and a ram all take turns staring down at him, suspended over several interlocking rings of golden eyes that spin as he watches.

Dean waves.

Above him, Castiel glows brighter than Venus. 

* * *

When Dean wakes, he’s alone again. The covers are slightly turned down where Cas had been, although the sheets are long-cold. Dean yawns until his jaw cracks, stretching his arms over his head, and takes a moment to appreciate how fantastic his body feels after some decent sleep. Sometimes he gets a little hungover after Cas works his magic on him, but he guesses it doesn’t take as much concentrated angel juice to conk him out as it does to knit his bones back together.

He can hear Sam laughing a couple rooms over. It makes him smile as he swings his legs over the side of the bed and locates where he tossed his pants last night, which turns out to be across the back of a chair, his shirt abandoned on the floor nearby. He’s rubbing at bleary eyes when he stumbles into the kitchen, squinting at Sam and Cas, both of whom look very awake.

It’s weird as hell to see Cas dressed in normal-people clothes. He’s layered a borrowed v-neck from Sam under a flannel from Dean, blue and green, cool and muted colors. His slacks are the only part of his usual outfit that survived the Empty. Now he’s leaned up against the counter with his long sleeves rolled up to the elbows and he looks like the kind of guy Dean might see at the bars he goes to — he looks like a hunter.

It’s jarring. It’s way too early for this shit.

“Time ‘s it?” Dean grunts, making grabby hands at the coffee pot in Sam’s hand.

“Ten in the morning, sleepyhead,” Sam tells him, and takes pity, pouring a cup for Dean that he pushes into his hands. “You really sacked out last night, huh?”

“Shut it,” Dean says, and catches Cas hiding a smile by turning his face away.

They pack up the actual freaking U-haul trailer Sam rented sometime before Dean woke up, and they steal a couple starter pieces of furniture from the bunker to tide them over until Dean and Cas can buy their own shit. Dean stubs his toe pretty hard on the front door while wrestling his mattress outside, and whines about it until Sam smacks him upside the head and Cas calls him a wuss.

“I’m not U-hauling it with you two,” Sam says, closing the back of the trailer decisively. “You guys take Baby, I’ll drive the stuff.”

“Funny guy,” Dean says, flustered despite himself. “It’s my goddamn bed in there.”

“You’d rather I drive your goddamn car?” Sam asks, raising his eyebrows.

Dean almost sticks his tongue out at him. Almost. It’s a very close thing.

He’s hyper-aware of Cas in the passenger seat once they’re on the road, especially with no Sam to act as a buffer between them. Dean kind of wants to ask about what the hell all that stuff had been last night, the spooning and whatnot, but he can't make the words come out. It was the best he’d slept since Cas had died, anyway, not that the bar was particularly high; it’s the first time in a long time where he hasn’t had at least a vague inkling of a nightmare nipping at his heels. 

No, all he’d dreamed of was sweet cool grass and more of the milky way than he’d ever seen at once, and a guardian angel whose wingspan had eaten the moon. Dean glances at Cas. He’s fiddling with the radio.

“I thought you didn’t sleep,” Dean says. 

Cas makes a noncommittal noise and flips past a station of staticky mariachi music. “I don’t. Why do you mention it?”

“You said you couldn’t sleep,” Dean says. “Before you — y’know.”

“I said I couldn’t rest,” Cas corrects. He skips past a classical station as well. “If I cared to sleep, I would.” 

That gives Dean pause, because he’s pretty sure angels just don’t have the capability. Then again, what he doesn’t know about angels could fill a library, and Cas is a whole category unto himself, anyway. Maybe he picked it up from when he was briefly human. Maybe he’s spent enough time watching Dean snore in motel rooms to learn a trick or two.

“Most people like a warning before somebody gets in bed with ‘em,” Dean says after a moment.

Cas looks at him sideways. “You respond best to acts of intimacy when caught off-guard. Ah, I like this song.”

Dean splutters, mouth opening and closing, because what the hell! You can’t just say that to a person!

Cas isn’t interested in watching Dean struggle to reply, though, he’s leaning back in his seat with his eyes drifting closed. It takes a second for Dean to recognize the song that’s playing, but then —

“The Black Keys?” Dean demands. “Everlasting Light? You like this song?”

Cas doesn’t bother opening his eyes. “Mm. To be someone’s _ner tamid_ is quite a romantic notion, in my opinion.”

Dean doesn’t really want to hear Cas keep talking about romance, but he’s always been the type to poke a bruise. “What’s that?” he asks. “Ner tamid.”

“The eternal burning light,” Cas sighs. “In Jewish theology. Most synagogues have a light always lit near the ark carrying the Torah, it harkens back to the old Temple in Jerusalem.”

Dean gets the same funny shiver up his spine that he always gets when he remembers just how old Cas is: old enough to have been there watching when the first stone was laid down to begin building the old Temple in Jerusalem, old enough to have put his hand on the foundation before the walls were built.

“I haven’t been to temple since mom died,” Dean blurts out, anything to cover up the sound of the song and the lyrics currently playing. He'll read too much into them if he pays too close attention, he knows himself. “Dad never went, so he didn’t take us afterward. Just the funeral. That’s it.”

Cas makes a thoughtful noise. “Your father was not Jewish.”

“No,” Dean agrees firmly. “But you know all that already, why’m I telling you?”

“I’d rather hear it from you,” Cas says, “than take what my superiors told me at face value.”

That’s fair enough. Dean shifts a little in his seat, wondering what exactly it was that Cas’s superiors had told him in the first place. He doubts they’d painted a particularly flattering picture, but that’s hardly news. 

“Dunno what else there is to say,” he says, scritching a hand over the back of his neck. “You know I never went for the whole God thing, and that was before I met him.”

“Do you consider yourself Jewish?” Cas asks.

“No,” Dean answers, then immediately regrets it. “Uh, yes. Maybe. I don’t know. Sam does.”

Not that he and Sam have ever talked extensively about it. Dean tends to clam up whenever their mom is brought up, especially after — but he’s not thinking about that either, he _isn’t,_ the same way he isn’t thinking about Jack, or the look on Cas’s face before he died again, or —

“Dean,” Cas murmurs. He puts his hand on Dean’s arm, just briefly, before he takes it away again. “My apologies. I didn’t intend to pry.”

“It’s fine,” Dean says automatically. He glances at Cas, relieved to find that his knee-jerk reply is correct. It is fine. Cas was just making conversation. “Anyway. What about you, huh?”

Cas looks genuinely surprised. “Me?”

“What d’you consider yourself?”

“I consider myself an angel.” Cas’s tone has gone very dry.

Dean kind of had that one coming. He rolls his eyes. “Whatever, man. Long as you aren’t Catholic.”

“I predate Catholicism,” Cas reminds him. “I predate all of Christianity, actually.”

“But not Judaism?” Dean asks.

Cas takes his time answering. He's looking out the window, and Dean can’t see his reflection this time, not this early in the day, so he has no idea what Cas’s face is doing. “I favor a religion that encourages asking questions,” he says very softly, and Dean decides to quit while he’s ahead.

“You’ve been paying attention when I told you about music,” he says after a beat. “This’s a good song.”

Cas’s shoulders relax just a fraction. Dean turns up the volume.

* * *

They meet Sam at a sandwich joint for lunch before they reconvene at the lake house, and everything is immediately easier when all three of them are there. Dean kicks Sam under the table just on principle and his head already hurts less than it did while Cas was asking him those pointed questions.

It hits him harder than usual when Sam wrinkles his nose and picks the bacon off his sandwich, though, and he wonders what it means, or if it even means anything at all. He’s happy to accept it when Sam puts it on his plate, anyway. Kosher or no.

Cas licks a stray drop of aioli off his wrist and Dean has to look away, toes curling in his boots. Since when does the guy eat, anyway? He seems to be enjoying himself a normal amount — maybe more than normal, if that aioli-licking business keeps up — and Dean is struck by how _not_ out of place Cas looks. He’s acclimatized to Earth after a decade down here.

Dean is relieved by this thought. He also feels real grief. If he’d known everything that would happen after tipping over that angel statuette in the beautiful room all those years ago... well, he probably wouldn’t have done anything different, honestly. But he might have thought about it a little harder.

Sam stretches and yawns, neck cracking. Dean gets up to pay their bill. 

It’s Cas’s turn to drive, so Dean takes a second to stretch his legs properly while Cas gets settled in the car, pacing around to the trailer Sam parked crooked in the restaurant lot. He checks on their stuff, opening the back to make sure it’s all strapped down securely, just looking for one last thing to do before he’s trapped in a car with Cas for another three hours.

“Is he talking about Jack yet?” Sam asks, leaning against the side of the car.

Dean’s mouth twists. He shuts the back of the trailer hard, flipping the lock. “Nope.”

“You gonna start that conversation?”

Dean shoots him a look. “He woke up from being dead and his son’s God. We’ll talk about it when he wants to.”

Sam holds up his hands in surrender, but his eyes are worried, and Dean’s got a sick feeling in his stomach that agrees with him.

“At least he seems... okay?” Sam hazards. “Ish?”

Dean nudges one of Sam’s tires with his foot. “Who even knows, with him.”

“I mean.” Sam rakes his hair back out of his eyes. “Historically? You do.”

Dean’s heart gives a little lurch at the thought. He isn’t Cas’s minder, and he knows this. If he has been _,_ then he’s done a piss-poor job of it, hasn’t he? It just — it’s somehow never occurred to him that maybe he’s the one who knows Cas best, the same as Cas knows him, down to the bones and then even further. Cas is unknowable, he’s a cosmic entity with a couple billion years under his belt, and somehow Dean of all people managed to become his best friend.

 _He chose fucking poorly,_ Dean thinks. _He coulda done a lot better._

Then again, that’s true about a lot of things. Cas has shit taste. And it’s always been guesswork, anyway, taking shot after shot in the dark; the fact that Dean guesses right more often than he guesses wrong is beyond his own comprehension.

“I don’t think he’s okay,” Dean says. “But I’m not gonna make him talk about his dead kid.”

Sam frowns. “Jack isn’t dead.”

“He’s as good as.” Dean shoves his hands in his pockets. “Cas is waiting for me. I gotta go.”

Sam nods, clapping Dean on the shoulder as he passes him on the way to the driver’s seat, and Dean is more grateful than ever that his brother can read a room.

When he gets back to his car, Cas is completely absorbed in perusing the road atlas. He has it braced up on the steering wheel, a crease of concentration between his brows, the same look Dean has seen him wear as he pours over every old-ass tome they’ve had to consult over the years. It’s kinda cute. 

Dean buckles himself in and tries to relax, sighing as he stretches his legs as far as the bench seat will allow. Cas is shorter than him and drives like a grandma, Dean is shoved up close to the dashboard. Better safe than sorry, though, with Baby. Dean will suffer the leg cramp, even if he’s gonna have to tease Cas for driving all hunched over the steering wheel like he needs bifocals.

“Mind if I close my eyes a minute?” Dean asks. “Weird dreams last night.”

Cas clears his throat. Baby’s engine turns over and pulls out of its parking space only a little jerkily. “Be my guest,” he says.

Dean closes his eyes, squirming around until he folds himself into the one comfortable position there is in the passenger seat, well-worn by Sam over the years. He can’t usually relax when anybody but him is behind the wheel, but it’s always been harder to _not_ trust Cas, even when it seems like it’s in his best interest.

Cas is humming to himself as he drives. It really ought to be more annoying than it is. Dean is soothed by the rumble, both of the engine and Cas’s voice — the honey and vodka rasp of it settles in Dean’s bones, and he relaxes despite himself, letting the sound wash over him as Cas’s fingertips _tap tap_ along to what sounds like Everlasting Light.

He drifts. He’s vaguely aware of Cas stopping for gas at some indeterminate point in time later, and then of a jacket being draped over him, the soft inside of an unzipped hoodie brushing against his face. Sam’s hoodie, he thinks. It smells like motel soap.

It's Sam’s hoodie and Cas’s hand on his cheek, very gentle as he tucks the hood down so it doesn’t cover Dean’s mouth.

He’s asleep again by the time Cas merges them back onto the highway. It isn’t the dreaming kind of sleep, it’s the half-awake sixty-five-miles-per-hour doze that lulls his soul down to silence, reduced to the jostle of wheels and little else. There’s nothing in the world like the road to smooth out his rougher edges.

He cracks an eye open when they hit gravel, still half a step too out of it to register what it means until the car glides to a stop. Cas puts Baby into park and turns off the engine, then unbuckles his seatbelt with a click loud enough to fill the whole car.

“Wake up, Dean,” he murmurs. He puts his hand on Dean’s arm. “We’re here.”

Dean stretches with a deeply sleepy noise and glances all around. In front of him, the lake house sits squat and proud in the dying light, sunset blooming open flowers all down the front in shades of pink and orange. He doesn’t know why he’s surprised to see those colors on Cas as well, dripping down the side of his throat facing the sun.

“We’re here,” Dean repeats. He blinks, then rubs his eye with the heel of his hand. “Home sweet home, eh?”

Cas doesn’t answer him for a long moment. “Yes,” he says eventually. “Yes, I hope so.”

**Author's Note:**

> I'm castieljew/transbucky on tumblr! Come say hi :)


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